Ronan doesn’t answer. There’s no point. They sit in silence until the six minutes are up, and when the spell shivers away, Dansa leaves him to sit alone.
As dawn breaks around the edges of the curtain, Ronan plucks a twenty-sided die from his bag. He tests it in his palm, then returns it and plucks out the unweighted one. There are some questions he can’t cheat the answers to. He closes his fist around the die and kisses his knuckle.Give me a sign, Trickster.
He rolls the die. Resin edges thunk against the table cloth, turning and jumping, and landing on a—
The die is about to land on a three when it pauses on its edge. Gold letters catch faint rays of sunlight—no, it’s not sunlight. The eerie blue-gold glow comes from the die itself, glittering through the painted numerals. The paused die turns, and falls, with a tremendous echo.
It lands on a twenty.
A shiver runs down Ronan’s spine, and all the lanterns flicker. When they steady, a cloaked shadow sits at the table. Light bends around him, and his cloak is an ever-changing patchwork of grays and blues and purples. Beneath the heavy cowl is a bronze mask carved into a smile.
“Trickster,” Ronan whispers.
The Trickster moves instantly, without transition, from sitting to standing. A pleasant, husky voice speaks in Ronan’s head.Walk with me, Ronan Vizia.
Ronan stands up too. Looking around the room, nobody else seems to have noticed anything unusual. Dansa is bending over the journal with Leth. On the bed, Coira has curled up on her side, while Evain lies flat with Alice in a loaf on his chest, silently watching his face. They don’t notice anything as Ronan follows the Trickster out the door.
Nobody else in the Veiled Rose notices them either as they walk down the hallway, towards a door that unlocks when the Trickster merely glances at it. Moments later, Ronan stands on the roof with his god, watching the sun crest over the horizon. The Veiled Rose is only three stories tall, but the neighborhood sits on a hill in the northern quarter of the city, and the rest of Ostaris spreads out before their eyes. The Bright Cathedral catches the light to the east, like a second sun caught to earth.
Ronan wonders if Karis is there yet, or still on the road.
In the dawn, the Trickster’s mask gleams gold, then silver, then bronze again.You asked for a sign. I’ll give you a story.
Ronan’s bones are heavy with the weight of the Trickster’s words. His throat is dry. “I’m listening.”
The Trickster reaches out a hand, palm up. His hands are gloved in leather, or the appearance of leather. Blue and gray smoke swirls above his palm, then coalesces into a translucent figure. A man with a greatsword. Then another figure, a crowned woman. The figure shifts again, again, until it settles on a woman, one arm overflowing with herbs, the other hand clutching a knife.
The Trickster says,Two hundred years ago, I quarrelled with several of my kindred. They wronged me, I wronged them, and they wronged me again. At last, I schemed with several ambitious humans to lock up my rivals. A few hundred years is very little to our kind.
Ronan knows all this already.
We collected relics and chose a sacred place for the binding. The little sword-witch is correct—that place is the Bright Cathedral.The Trickster’s sigh sounds like winter.Five gods we meant to bind. Radiant Vara. Mother Sephine. Lord Maiza. Ka Dravos. Kan Halla.
Ronan’s breath catches. “Songbird. The last one was Songbird, not Kan Halla.”
It was supposed to be Kan Halla,Trickster says, and the horror of that revelation rips through Ronan like a frozen wind.
Kan Halla, god of herb and knife, medicine, preserving life and easing death. She answers prayers for healing in most dire times of need. Her sworn healers are essential to the fabric of society. How many lives are saved by healers’ hands each year? By the potions they imbue? Imagining Kan Halla’s powers bound with the other four in Charain—reducing her domain to just one country, leaving Praia and Etenia and all the rest without—
You’re horrified.The Trickster sounds amused, and Ronan remembers viscerally that this is a god, capricious and immortal, not a human. But the Trickster’s amusement vanishes in his next sentence.Songbird was horrified too.The figure above his palm changes to a bird, then a young man in a cloak of feathers. Then vanishes, and the Trickster’s hand falls to his side.Songbird discovered my intent, and he hid from me that he’d discovered it. He crept after the mortals to the place where the cathedral now stands, and at the last moment, he switched Kan Halla’s relic for his own. They trapped him, instead of her.
The sun has fully risen above the horizon now, but Ronan feels even colder with the light of day.
The Trickster says,I was playing with a hungry friend in Lyrisenia at the time. I only learned later what Songbird had done.A bitter laugh.The only trick he’s ever played on me.
“Is that why you changed your mind?” Ronan has always wondered why the Trickster would work so hard to unravel his own scheme. “Is that why you told my teacher about the binding in the first place?”
Clever boy,the Trickster says. It’s not a compliment, but it’s not an insult either.
Ronan thinks about smooth, freckled skin. The way his heart races when he meets gleaming amber eyes. He thinks about soft lips and sharp smiles, and he asks, “Do you love Songbird?”
More than that,the Trickster says.But yes, that too.
The god’s form wavers in the brightening sunlight. Ronan asks quickly, “What does this mean? Now that I know this, what should I make of it?”
What you will, the Trickster says, and then fades from view.
?
